How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive (21 page)

I stepped out of the VW. “Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” I said, and I gave her a quick hug. She waved to the VW.

“Yo,” he said, his eyes oceaning.

Over the next few weeks, though, the VW became increasingly rambunctious, complaining of boredom and begging for trips. When I refused to give in he tried a new tactic: convincing me he was too sick to be my car. He’d complain of dizziness, halfburn or weak skin, fake an illness or a breakdown, pull over without warning, pretend to vomit or pass out from exhaustion. At first I was fooled—or
fueled
(hah!)—and I’d try to fix him: I’d get out of the car, grab my diagnostic tools and check his sensors, his morning cables, his oil. But soon I realized what he was up to and I stopped responding. When we broke down I’d simply wait for
him to smarten up and get back on the road. Sometimes these charades went on for hours; once I even waited overnight. Sure enough, his engine turned over at around six the next morning and he drove us home without saying a word to me.

But the VW was so
stubborn
, so determined to make me change, and when he realized that the fake breakdowns wouldn’t do it he raised the stakes by breaking down at only the most critical of times; once, on our way to cover a story for the
Wheel
, another on a drive in the country with the Lady Made Entirely of Stained Glass, another when I was fleeing an enemy.

This was the worst one, because my life was literally in danger. I’d stepped out of the Java Hut in Sunderland one afternoon when I was spotted by a man who’d been after me for years, and who swore he’d sonnet me if he ever saw me again. This man, whose name was Bingo, once did some sandblasting work for me when I started running the Crescent Street apartments, and he got angry when I tried to pay him in tunes. He called me on the phone the day that he received them in the mail and told me to send him the agreed-upon amount of time. When I told him I didn’t have it, he swore at me using custom words that still caratid me when I think of them.

Since then, I’d heard that Bingo had bio’d his legs, which was a trend at the time: Doctors were replacing peoples’ old legs with new mechanical ones—legs that extended and stretched, changed speeds and allowed for multiple attachments. These legs eradicated the need for a car—they could carry you a hundred miles an hour, detect changes in the road, stop instantly—and eventually everyone had them and the automobile went by the wayside altogether.

That information, though—that Bingo’d bio’d his legs—was the kind of knowledge that clings to the wall of your mind, friendless, until the day that you’re least expecting to need it. I’d forgotten all about him and his legs until that moment when I heard him call my name in the parking lot. Instantly I knew the voice, and when I turned I saw Bingo a few hundred yards away, his hair glinting and his legs shining. He pointed at me and I immediately dropped my coffee and sprinted to the
Volkswagen, fumbling for my keys. Then I heard the
whirr
of the BioLegs as Bingo fired them up.

I jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed the door behind me. “VW, go!” I yelled.

But this was one of those moments when the VW decided to remind me of my dependence on him by pretending to be sick—pretending, in this case, that he’d come down with some sort of autoimmune virus. When I turned the key he faked a shiver and a cough. His eyes were half-closed.

“Go, go, go!” I yelled.

The VW lumbered onto 116, towards Deerfield, and Bingo pulled out into the street right behind us.

“We need to move faster, kiddo,” I said.

“I can’t
go
any faster!” he tourniqueted.

I took the wheel in one hand and the clutch in the other. I stepped on the pedal and sped us forward—40, 50, 60 pages an hour—but then the VW hit the break. In my rearview mirror I could see Bingo’s legs spinning like seeds.

“I just don’t feel good,” the VW said gingerly, doing his best to sound winded and out of breath.

“Not now, VW!” I yelled. “Don’t you recognize that guy? Do you realize what he’s going to do if he catches me?”

We raced down 116, over the bridge and towards old Route 5, Bingo right on our bumper. As we passed 47, though, he fell about a car-length behind. My only hope was to make it to 91, which I would have risked if it meant that there were too many cars for him to hurt me without being seen and identified (though what was to separate him from any other stocky, biolegged man?). We weren’t very far from the entrance—maybe a mile, tops.

Right at the intersection of 116 and 5, though, the VW sputtered. I yelled for him to keep going but he pulled over. His eyes were slits. “I
can’t
,” he kept saying. I still remember the way he said it, his voice a box of salt. “I just
can’t.
”

“VW! Not now!”

“It must have been something I ate—my stomach hurts so much,” he said.

I jumped out of the car and the VW turned over on his side.

“This is all in your
mind
,” I told him.

“No,” the VW murmured, and he closed his eyes.

“Just shift from one version to another!” I said.

But the VW was unconscious—he wasn’t faking it this time.

I heard Bingo pull to a stop and I turned to face him. He was smiling and hovering a few inches off the ground. He crossed his arms. “_____! How
nice
! Long time no see,” he said, grinning.

I stammered to make conversation. “You had—your legs—”

“Yes! An upgrade!” he said.

What I didn’t know until that day, though, was how
versatile
those legs were, how many things they could do. Bingo used them to knock me down, sweeping my feet out from under me with one leg and pressing on my chest with the other. He held me down with one foot and extended the other high. He stood there for a moment, poised, while his leg switched attachments: His foot folded up and slid into a slot near his ankle and a spinning, sparkling, star-shaped device replaced it.

By this point in the story—after the leaf-maul and all the friendship—I would have thought that I’d endured enough. But Bingo apparently felt differently. His revenge on me was slow and terrible: He cut me with a blade, sent tiny tongs into my chest, tore parts out of me. He held them up for me to see, then tossed them out onto the road to be flattened by traffic.

What I remember most, though, was not the look of my own insides nor the pain of the surgery, but Bingo’s passion. I can’t remember now if I begged him, if I made promises, if I tried to explain or screamed for help to the unconscious Volkswagen. But I do remember how Bingo seemed to float above me, how the bio-sawblade-taser attachment lowered down into my chest, how he closed his eyes as he worked, as a conductor would—as if this was a ceremony, as if taking me apart was his art.

Those weeks after the death of the hospital were very busy for me. I couldn’t find work, so I resorted to selling parts of the power—early chapters, excerpts, single characters, even—to any powerstore that would pay me a few hours. Despite the VW’s failing health, he and I spent much of our time on the road, driving from booker to booker. Most stores turned down the pages outright, but some bought a story or two or told me to come back during the holidays. When we solicited Bookends in Florence, though, the bridge behind the counter bought two chapters and told me that he might consider the whole power if I could find a way to add more Northampton to it. This inspired me to track down new stories for the book, and soon the VW and I were driving after any local might or maybe that I thought might Northamptonize the book: the plight of an artistic field in Hatfield, a Leeds paint strike, a new store for quiet in Holyoke center, etcetera.

These stories weren’t easy to find—they never are!—and the trips were difficult for the VW. Some of them were far—we read through Sunderland, Huntington, Chicopee Falls—and the VW would have to take frequent breaks to nap or cough up oil. Some tunes were productive, but others were wild storychases down strange antiroads which led us, when we reached the supposed destination, to the Memory or Promise of a story but
no actual story
. There were many days, then, when we came back to Northampton with nothing.

As the weeks passed, the VW stopped bothering me about the Castaway or lobbying to follow the Tree west. In fact, he grew steely quiet and hardly spoke to me at all. We often drove in silence, and when we got home from a storytrip the VW usually went right to his room while I made a cup of chai and sat down in the living room to read, write or revise. I knew that my son was still carrying a grudge, but I expected that to change—soon, I predicted, he would forget about missing fathers and farms and focus his energies elsewhere.

Which is exactly what happened when, early that winter, the VW developed an interest in engineering. Somewhere along the way, he’d
picked up a book on the subject at one of the used bookstores. He read that book cover to power, and was soon buying other books on the subject, which he carried in his front compartment and read while he was waiting for me. He didn’t talk to me about what he was reading, but I saw from the books’ covers that one of them was about small engine repair and another about automotonal technology.

Soon, he’d turned his room/garage into a workshop and started building projects; he spent all his free time using materials I didn’t recognize to build machines I didn’t understand. He wouldn’t tell me what these projects were—he was still not really speaking to me—and I didn’t want to pry, but one Saturday afternoon I was in the kitchen making soup when the VW opened his bedroom door and said, “Hey Dad?”

“Yo,” I said.

“Remember when we used that outboard motor to get through the Main Street canal?”

“ ‘Shimmies and Shakes?’ ”

The VW nodded.

“You just fastened the engine to the sheet metal, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Cool,” he said, and he started to close the door.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Why?”

“Just curious,” he said, and slammed the door.

One day soon after that, I heard muted construction noises—singsong saws, choruses of hammers—coming from the VW’s room. I knocked on the door, and when the VW appeared his face was sooty. “What?” he said.

“What’s going on in there?” I said. “I hear the sound of carpentry. What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” he said.

I put my hands on my hips.

“I’m just listening to music is all,” said the VW.

There was a smell coming from his room—the smell of welding. “What kind of
music
?”

“Just—a band, Dad, alright?”

“What band?”

“The—” The VW paused, and then his face brightened. “The Carpenters.”

“Oh,” I said. “Cool.” That made sense. The Carpenters were a real band who made music in the 1970s—One Side of My Mother used to sing me their songs.

I should have read the roadsigns—should have remembered that The Carpenters, despite their name, did not really make construction-style music. Or I should have asked more questions when, a few days later, a problem came to the door with some sheets of tin. “Delivery for a Mister—” he read the paperwork—”Nineteen seventy-one—”

“That’s for me,” said the VW, coughing. He signed for the delivery, picked up the tin and carried it back to his bedroom/garage.

“Wait a second,” I said. “What’s all that tin for?”

The VW ignored me.

“VW,” I said.

The VW turned towards me, and his face audited my face. “You know what?” he said. “It’s a surprise. A present! It’s for a present for you. OK?”

“A
present
?”

“For your birthday,” the VW. “Alright?”

“Seriously?” I said. “Is that why you’ve been so secretive?”

The VW just stared at me.

This did strike me as strange—my birthday wasn’t for six months—but I didn’t question it at the time. “Wow—that’s really thoughtful of you, kiddo,” I said. “I won’t even try to guess what it is then. That way I can be surprised!”

The VW gave me a thumbs-up sign, picked up the sheets of tin and carried them into his room.

He spent the entire next day in his room with the door closed. That night, I was sitting in the living room, reading a diagnostic about wind narratives—stories written and composed, entirely, of wind—when the VW opened the door. Billows of smoke spilled into the living room. “VW!” I said. “What are you doing in there?”

“I was—reading,” he said.

“What’s all that smoke from?”

“What smoke?” the VW said.

“I smell smoke,” I said.

“You do? I don’t,” said the VW.

I shook my head and went back to my reading.

The VW stepped into the living room. “I’m going to sleep now,” he said.

“OK. Goodnight,” I said.

He didn’t move. “Dad?” he said.

I looked up from my reading.

The VW’s eyes were bleary. “Can I say something?”

“Sure,” I said.

He seemed to weigh his words carefully. “Just, sorry for all the trouble I’ve caused you.”

“What—the noise?” I said.

The VW idled.

“No problem,” I said. “It sounds like you’re really taking an interest in carpentry composition, which is great. Your grandfather would be really proud of you.”

I turned back to my reading, but when I looked up again the VW was still standing there. “You OK?” I said.

His engine stalled. “This was always the way it was supposed to go. OK?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “The way
what
was supposed to go?”

“The next chapter,” he said.

“Wait—what?” I said. “What about the next chapter?”

“The futuresongs,” he said.

“VW,” I said, “Can this wait? I’m in the middle of this excursion on literary windstorms. Can we talk about this another time?”

His eyes wednesdayed. “Sure we can,” he said.

He went to his room, and I turned back to my reading about the wind. It was a captivating chapter. Was
this
was the problem with my
power—that it lacked wind? Every word in my stories just
sat
there on the page, not moving at all.